Cahokia‘s just one of almost a thousand sites around the world that UNESCO considers to form, “part of the cultural and natural heritage” of the world that has “outstanding universal value.”
It’s a remarkable selection of places, from natural geological wonders like the Grand Canyon, to biological preserves like Peru’s Manú National Park, to cultural landscapes like that of Bam, Iran.
The long, detailed descriptions of the importance of these sites makes the World Heritage List website is a remarkable resource for cultural and physical geography.
Students observe the physical and human geography of the Mississippi flood plain from the top of the main mound at Cahokia. An ox-bow lake can be seen to on the right side of the picture, and behind it is a glimpse of the Mississippi River with St. Louis in the distance.
Almost a thousand years ago, 20,000 people lived at a place called Cahokia. At the center of their city, was the largest artificial mound in North America. A large part of Cahokia’s success is surely its location: near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers — just across the Mississippi from modern-day St. Louis. Yet less than 400 years later (see timeline) the city was abandoned, and no one is quite sure what happened.
Our middle and high school took a trip out to Cahokia last month. It was during the same intercession between quarters when we visited the Laumeier Sculpture Park, the Da Vinci Exhibition, and did our brief biological survey of the campus.
The elevation of the main mound, sitting on the flat Mississippi flood plain, with the St. Louis skyline in the distance, was a great place to talk about the importance of physical geography in the location of cities (your biggest cities are always going to be on rivers, or the ocean or, often, both) and to reflect on how history repeats itself — a once thriving metropolis is nothing now but displaced piles of alluvium and mystery.
Cahokia is a World Heritage Site, and it has an excellent museum. I particularly liked the detail in their life-sized reconstruction of a section of the city.
Their website is also good. Apart from the timeline, mentioned above, they have a nice interactive map for details about each of the numerous mounds, and a long page about the archeology.
The site is pretty big, so you can spend a fair amount of time exploring. Fall, when the leaves have turned color, and the air has cooled a little, is an excellent time to visit.
There was a neat little conference today, organized by LEGO’s Education division. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to include robotics in my math and science classes, but since I haven’t had the time to delve into it, I was wondering if the LEGO Robotics sets would be an easy way to get started. It turns out that they have a lot of lesson plans and curricula available that are geared for kids all the way from elementary to high school, so I’m seriously considering giving it a try.
Pedagogically, there are a lot of good reasons to integrate robotics into our classes, particularly as the cornerstone of a project-based-learning curriculum.
The act of building robots increases engagement in learning. Just like assembling Ikea furniture makes people like it better, when students build something the accomplishment means more to them.
Working on projects builds grit, because no good project can succeed without some obstacles that need to be overcome. Success comes through perseverance. Good projects build character.
The process of building robots provides a sequence of potential “figure it out” moments because of the all steps that go into it, especially when students get ambitious about their projects. And students learn a whole lot more when they discover things on their own.
Projects don’t instill the same stress to perform as do tests. Students learn that learning is a process where you use your strengths and supplement your weaknesses to achieve a goal. They learn that their worth is more than the value of an exam.
Projects promote creativity, not kill it like a lot of traditional education.
In terms of the curriculum, Physics and Math applications are the most obvious: think about combining electronics and simple machines, and moving robots around the room for geometry. A number of the presenters, Matthew Collier and Don Mugan for example, advocate for using it across the curriculum. Mugan calls it transdisciplinary education, where the engineering project is central to all the subjects (in English class students do research and write reports about their projects).
I’ve always favored this type of learning (Somewhat in the Air is a great example), but one has to watch out to make sure that you’re covering all the required topics for a particular subject. Going into one thing in depth usually means you have to sacrifice, for the moment at least, some width. The more you can get free of the strictures of traditional schooling the better, because then you don’t have to make sure you hit all the topics on the physics curriculum in the seemingly short year that you officially teach physics.
The key rules about implementation that I gleaned from presentations and conversations with teachers who use the LEGO robotics are that:
Journaling is essential. Students are going to learn a lot more if they have to plan out what they want to do, and how to do it, in a journal instead of just using trial-and-error playing with the robots.
Promote peer-teaching. I advocate peer teaching every chance I get; teaching is the best way to learn something yourself.
2 kids per kit. I heard this over and over again. There are ways of making larger groups work, but none are ideal.
A Plan of Action
So I’m going to try to start with the MINDSTORM educational kit, but this requires getting the standard programming software separately. One alternative would be to go with the retail kit, which is the same price and has the software (although I don’t know if anything else is missing).
I think, however, I’ll try to get the more advanced LabVIEW software that seems to be used usually for the high school projects that use the more sophisticated TETRIX parts but the same microcontroller brick as the MINDSTORM sets. LabVIEW might be a little trickier to learn, but it’s based on the program used by engineers on the job. Middle and high students should be able to handle it. But we’ll see.
Since LabVIEW is more powerful, it should ease the transition when I do upgrade to the TETRIX robots.
The one potential problem that came up, that actually affects both software packages, is that they work great for linear learners, but students with a more random access memory will likely have a harder time.
At any rate, not I have to find a MINDSTORM set to play with. Since I’m cheap I’ll start by asking around the school. Rumor has it that there was once a robotics club, so maybe someone has a set sitting around that I can burrow. We’ll see.
Everything depends on your point of view — more or less. Our picture of the universe has changed in the last 60 years as telescope technology has improved. Popsci has a great interactive visualization showing how much more we can see now.
Notice that in this picture, the Earth is at the center of the universe (the Sun is a little way off to the middle lower left). After all, we’re looking at the universe from the Earth, not the other way around.
The universe as it appeared in 1950, compared to what we can see now (2011). Image from Popsci.com
Rowan Kaiser asserts that Mort‘s the best place to start to discover the wonderful novels of Terry Pratchett.
the Discworld books combine silliness, satire, philosophy, and strong characterization to create a unique, often wonderful tone that’s more than capable of supporting a series with so many installments. But the number of installments can seem overwhelming, especially given that while the books have standalone narratives, they also have consistent sets of characters who develop over the course of the series, leading to an apparently complicated web of a few different, occasionally overlapping series-within-a-series.
My recommendation would be one of her runner-up gateways — either Guards! Guards! or Wyrd Sisters — but she makes good points. Her third runner-up, Small Gods, which is one of the stand-alone novels is one of my favorites, and was my first Pratchett book. And it got me hooked.
Pratchett’s work is intelligent fantasy, in that it’s a lot like the hard science fiction I prefer. It sets up the rules of its universe and then follows them to their logical conclusions, no matter how absurd.
I often wonder how these books would appeal to adolescents since there’s a distinct possibility that much of the quite enjoyable satire would pass over their heads. The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents won the Carnegie Medal for children/young adults, but while it retains Pratchett’s characteristic style and humor, it was written for a younger demographic, unlike most of his other books. I did get one student to read Small Gods, and her response, with a grimace was, “It made me think“.
visual.ly posts and hosts some excellent graphics. The one below, calculates the nearly infinitesimal probability of just being born. There’s hardly a better argument for appreciating life.
It’s also a good example of working with probabilities [and] exponents. Very large exponents.
C.G.P Grey makes the case against the Electoral College in video form. He starts with how the Electoral College Works and continues with a well reasoned polemic against it: he’s big into democracy — one person, one vote.
"Seasoning" a cast iron frying pan creates a non-stick coating. (Image by Evan-Amos via Wikipedia).
Back in the day, if you wanted a non-stick cooking skillet, your best option was to do it yourself by seasoning a cast metal pan. Sheryl Canter has an excellent post describing the science behind the “seasoning” process. The key is to bake on a little bit of oil to create a strong cross-linked polymer surface. This is a nice tie into our discussion of polymers and polymerization in the middle school science class; although I’m not sure how many of my students have actually seen a cast iron pan, or even know what cast iron is.
Normal polymers are long molecules made up of smaller molecules linked together, much like a paperclip chain.Cross-linked polymers are created when the long chained polymers are linked together by cross-links. It makes for a much sturdier molecule.
To season, you coat the pan with a thin layer of oil and bake it for a while (without anything in it). Baking releases free radicals from the metal that react with the oil to create a cross-linked polymer that’s really hard to break down or wear out, and prevent food from sticking to the pan. Different, cross linked polymers are used in car tires for their durability, but probably not for their lack of stickiness.
Apparently, linseed oil is the best seasoning agent, but it might be a bit hard to find.
Most non-stick, artificial surfaces, are also made of polymers of hydrocarbons, silicon oxides and other interesting chemicals.
Making a cross-linked polymer with borax and polyvinyl alcohol.
